Saturday, July 13, 2013

Background Mortality Rate for Vaccines, or Pseudo Study?

Parents of vaccine-injured children call for a study comparing the health of vaccinated and unvaccinated people. So the CDC has come up with a study that, at first glance, appears to provide just that. But that’s just the first glance. A closer view shows that it looks more like another attempt to obscure the truth.

A study claims to do what should have been done decades ago: identify the background rate of mortality so that an accurate rate of vaccination risk can be determined. It’s fairly obvious that such information would be of great value. If you know how many people die in an unvaccinated population, then the rate of death after a vaccine is introduced can beidentified fairly accurately. This study, though, suffers from a multitude of problems that negate any possibility of providing a genuine background rate of mortality to determine a vaccine’s risk.

Most Obvious Flaws

The most obvious concern is that the new study does not determine the death rate in an unvaccinated population. In fact, only vaccinated people are included! So how can it possibly provide information about the background death rate in unvaccinated people?

Nonetheless, the study, published in the American Review of Preventive Medicine, states that its goal is to:

Provide background mortality rates and describe causes of death following vaccination in the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD).

The study investigates only the death rate within 60 days of vaccination. In fact, most of the conditions association with vaccines are long term, not ones that kill quickly. Therefore, most people harmed by vaccines would not be detected through such a simplistic approach. Another consideration is that the study specifically eliminates anyone who has not been vaccinated, since the date of vaccination is the start time for each person’s entry into the study.
The study was produced by Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), a collaboration between the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and 10 managed care organizations (MCOs), including 6 Kaiser facilities, Group Health Cooperative of Seattle, Washington, Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, both of Boston, Massachussetts, and Marshfield Clinic of Marshfield, Wisconsin. The VSD is supposed to provide, according to the CDC, “immunization safety studies” and states:

The VSD has proven to be a highly effective tool for evaluating immunization safety. Since 1990, investigators from the VSD has [sic] published numerous scientific studies on the best ways to use existing immunization safety data.[2]

Interestingly, the VSD consistently finds absolutely nothing wrong with vaccine safety—not even for the so-called cervical cancer vaccines, Gardasil and Cervarix, for which extremely high rates of severe adverse effects compared to any other vaccines have been documented, based on the CDC’s and FDA’s own Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS).

Claims of No Conflict of Interest Exaggerated

It’s fairly obvious from this alone that the CDC itself is vested in covering up the harms done by vaccines. Serious research, including laboratory studies like those done by Christopher Shaw and Romain Gherardi and their groups, or mathematical analyses, like those done by Neil Z. Miller and Gary Goldman—to name only some of the best known researchers—has documented the strong link between vaccines and severe harm, including autism and a range of autoimmune and neurological disorders. Yet, virtually everything vaccine-related that comes out of the CDC serves to whitewash them.

This study claims that only one of its researchers has any conflict of interest. That one, Roger Baxter, receives research grants from Sanofi Pasteur, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Novartis, and Pfizer, which are all major vaccine makers. However, we need to go deeper than such obvious links to vaccine manufacturers in determining whether there’s any untoward influence. In this case, the lead researcher, Frank DeStefano, by virtue of his position as Director of the CDC’s Immunization Safety Office, which funded this study, cannot truly be considered free of bias. DeStefano recently produced a study claiming that there is no link between autism and vaccinations. Gaia Health documented how deeply flawed it is in CDC Claim of No Autism-Vaccine Link Based on Junk Science.

The previous director of the CDC, Julie Gerberding, left that position to take on the highly lucrative position of Merck’s vaccine division president and is also director of MSD Wellcome Trust Hilleman Laboratories Private Limited. She is an example of the routine movement of people from the CDC to lush positions in the pharmaceutical industry that they’re supposed to be regulating.

It begs credulity to suggest that there is no conflict of interest between the CDC and the vaccine industry. This study stands as a monument to that fact.

Subtle Flaws

Aside from the obvious flaws of not even looking at the unvaccinated and only considering deaths up to 60 days after a vaccination, there are other less apparent flaws.

Types and Numbers of Vaccinations

No consideration was given for what type of vaccination was given or whether they were combination or multiple vaccinations. That most likely has a significant effect on the results. People of all ages were included in the study, and it’s highly unlikely that people of different ages received the same vaccines. After all, adults are rarely given vaccines usually given for childhood disease, such as measles, mumps, and rubella. Adults receive far fewer combination or multiple vaccines. Thus all vaccinations and vaccines were treated as equal. How did this affect the results? We simply do not know.

Time of Enrollment in Study

Time in the study is counted only until an individual’s death. That may seem okay on the surface, but it means that those who died earlier are weighted less than those who died later or survived. A person who died the day after a vaccination compared to someone who lived for 60 days counts only one-sixtieth as much. That gives more weight to the person who lived longer.

Person-Years

The study provides its primary results in terms of person-years. This is simply not a valid measurement for this type of study. It’s useful in a study that’s concerned with time of exposure to something, such as a toxin. It can demonstrate that short term exposure is less harmful than long term exposure, or that harm develops within a certain period of time.

However, this study was not like that. Instead, it was about harm produced by a single event, vaccination. In such a study, person-time results do not provide the needed information. What’s needed in a study like this is a figure that tells us what percent of people are harmed. It can be interesting and helpful to learn how long after an event the harm occurred, but the salient concern is simply whether the event occurred or didn’t occur.

Assumption of Health at Time of Vaccinaton

The authors state:

Generally, people are more likely to receive a vaccine when they are in a relatively healthy, disease-free state, and the VSD mortality rates demonstrate this healthy vaccinee effect.

Is this true? The fact is that public health authorities tend to focus on people who are considered to be immune-compromised or otherwise unhealthy in their vaccination programs! That’s the antithesis of the assumption made by the authors of this study. It could very well be that the average vaccinee is less healthy than the average person, not the opposite.

No Limits to Evade Doing a Study Comparing Vaccinated with Unvaccinated

It’s quite obvious that the only way to allay concerns of vaccinations risks—or to prove them valid—is with an honest, large-scale study comparing outcomes between vaccinated and unvaccinated people. If our health agencies were interested in the truth, the first thing they’d have done is such a study. But they refuse to do one. Instead, they have trotted out this pseudo science, which gives the impression that they’re providing the basis for making such a comparison.

The CDC promotes it with the following statement:

Determining the baseline mortality rate in a vaccinated population is necessary to be able to identify any unusual increases in deaths following vaccine administration.[3]

That sounds true, but notice that they there’s no clarification about what group of people is included in the background. As it happens, in this study the background consists of people who are vaccinated! They go on to say:

Although there is currently no evidence to support a causal relationship between vaccinations and death, this study provides background mortality rates following vaccination to be used as a baseline when examining the safety profiles of new vaccines and during mass immunization campaigns.p3[

A casual read gives us the impression that this study looks at the mortality rates of unvaccinated people, but careful reading shows otherwise. The CDC has absolutely no interest in discovering whether the current vaccine schedule is harming and killing people.

Science is being perverted by the very agencies that are tasked with protecting the public’s health. There appears to be no limit of subterfuge and use of junk science in the effort to support these agencies’ true agenda: to provide cover for and enforce the will of their true masters, Big Pharma.